Interest in Giant emu frontends?

[skeezix]

mod: maybe should move this to the general (non-dev) forum; doh! Nomatter..

For ST emus, it occurred to me a few years ago that it might be worth doing something; the same coudl be done for Amiga and C64 and others of course, and probably has..

Get a thumbnail screenshot libary for the machine, and compile it into a giant zipfile (say). Then when scrolling through the available game selections, show the thumbnails.

The reason I didn't do this 5 years ago on the GP32 and so on in the GP2x is several fold -- the size of the data versus the media size, and the more important issue.. with disk based systems like the ST, Amiga, PC, C64 .. there were usually many games on a given disk compilation from a crack group. ie: If you scroll over FooWhackyDisk.ST, theres no real concrete way of knowing what software s on. (I addressed this, paritally, by mapping 'popular disk' CRCs to list of what games were on the disk. The long toothed of you may remember a big group of us GP32 folks madly typing in game listings and I still distirbute the ST Games Database

The first issue -- media size, is not really a big deal anymore. ie: Say you put together a list of 4000 games, each with a couple screenshots.. maybe 100k of data for each game. Thats 4000 * 100,000b or about 400MB. Thats a big file, but when people are talking about buying 16 or 32GB SD cards, its not that big a deal. Naturally, you also don't have to do 4000 games.. you could do 'top 500' or an 'RPG Theme pack', or a tool that extracts the thmbnails from the mega-zip, and into a subset that it actually knows are on your SD (ding ding!)

The second issue is the much harder one -- but in some cases, such as with the TOSEC movement and others, and people putting a lot of effort to move games to one-game-per-disk, or ripping original disks (PASTI images in ST-lingo, say), and other things.. maybe the disk name can be intuited to a set of screenshots with 'reasonable accuracy.' (It would still be hard to map Dungeon Master to a screenshot called 'DM.pcx', but if everything was lucky and your screenie was named DungeonMaster.png and your disk image was called DungeonMasterChaosStrikesBack.ST .. maybe some clever regular excpressions could match it up.

(Certainly there are databases, too; theres GameBaseST and GameBase64 and such, but the ST one at least is in a bloody Access DB (ftl!) .. but someone could dump parts out to xml or something, to make definiate mappings of screenshot to ROM.....)

So its an option.

Lots of work, but not an insane amount of work. ITs doable.

My quesiton is ..

Would you guys want a 300MB launcher for an emu?

(And I know, Amiga people will jump out and say YESSSS!! before even thinking about it

jeff

 

[javaJake]

Moved as requested, never-mind the fact that it does make a bit more sense to be here.

 

[sold]

A while ago, I was going to ask a similar question and I didn't, but I was thinking along the lines of a universal gaming front end that could execute roms based on file extensions for each relevant emulator, and would also allow users to take screenshots in game and automatically attach them to the rom in the menu as a thumbnail if they want to as well as being able to simply copy them to a screenshot folder if they already have them.

Roms and games could be seperated by system or genre or favorites as the user desired and the frontend could include menu options to make it easy to do so.

IMO it would be cool for pandora's emulators and could also act as a menu for source ports and other games.

It could act as an all encompassing games menu and reduce the clutter on the main screen. It would look awesome when played on a tv. It is a lot more user friendly that way imo.

What do you guys think? Is it possible?

 

[Kyosys]

Maybe you could just make a games.xml containing all games and links to thumbnails. You can add new games to that by using some kind of "add new game" or "mass import games" function

 

[JayFoxRox]

Right, it would make alot more sense to have some mirrors so only required thumbnails get downloaded (and a defintion file which has all CRCs in it).
You should be able to mass-import them once you have your list of games ready, so you only import those which are required (either from network, usb, sd-card or the internet mirrors).

I also think that 100k is alot of overkill for a thumbnail. Even most 320x240 (PNG, best quality) images are only 50k for me, yet, you could still get them smaller by using some more lossy format like jpeg - I end up at 5-10k, still with good quality.

//Edit: But in the end, it should be up to the developers of the emulators

 

[MatthewMalone]

How about bringing that idea together with savestates?
Like having an option of creating a jpg-screenshot along with the savestate.
By that you have only thumbnails of games that are on your card and which you have played already and you can see where you stopped.

 

[Username]

How about bringing that idea together with savestates?
Like having an option of creating a jpg-screenshot along with the savestate.
By that you have only thumbnails of games that are on your card and which you have played already and you can see where you stopped.

Sort of like the emulators on the Xbox... that would work.

 

[PoisonedV]

hyperspin-fe.com

its a great frontend, maybe it could be modeled after or inspired by it?

 

[jakewastaken]

hyperspin-fe.com

its a great frontend, maybe it could be modeled after or inspired by it?

These all look great. We can dream

 

[qwerty15]

How about bringing that idea together with savestates?
Like having an option of creating a jpg-screenshot along with the savestate.
By that you have only thumbnails of games that are on your card and which you have played already and you can see where you stopped.

This I think is a good idea and has actually been done with the game boy emulator for the GP2x (at least the screenshot for savestate part).

Get a thumbnail screenshot libary for the machine, and compile it into a giant zipfile (say). Then when scrolling through the available game selections, show the thumbnails.

I don't really like the idea of a giant zipfile taking up extra space . I'd rather have no screenshots and 300mb more space on my card. There was once this emulator that instead of using screenshots for a preview, actually loaded the rom in the background (pocketnes for gba I think). This gave a nice preview without taking up extra space . While highlighted, the game would play, and if you selected it, the menu would disappear and you would take control of the preview.

edit:
Here's a screenshot:

 

[Kyosys]

That sounds a little annoying, though.

 

[skeezix]

When I had mentioned 100k, it was because I was trying to make a 'fair estimate' for sizing. ie: Including multiple screenshots for a given game. (I was also basing numbers of existing projects, in my case.. the GameBaseST project.)

Making a merge tool/option to sort through your files and bring only over the needed collections is a good idea; ie: Someone could bring over the fat 300MB file (whatever size it is) to use 'in all cases', or run a tool that examines their directory and moves over what is matched, depending if they could be bothered.

Using the XML file is one way, but might overburden things, and is not what I aim for -- ie: Making your launcher show 600 'games' is not what people expect likely; they want it to show '5 emus' and let the emus menu show the game list. (But yes, they could create a folder/filter in the launcher, if it supports that sort of thing. So many 'ifs'.)

In essence though.. the quesiton is.. would people like to throw big giant files onto their SD card?

ie: We look at 300MB as large, but in practice, it is nothing nowadays

jeff

qwerty -- no one forces you to do anything In my context for ST emu .. if the giant-screenshot-file was present, just as you scrolled through a (say) TOSEC collection of games, it could shot the screenshot on the right (We have tonnes of screen realestate suddenly). *shrug*

 

[EmuGuy]

How about bringing that idea together with savestates?
Like having an option of creating a jpg-screenshot along with the savestate.
By that you have only thumbnails of games that are on your card and which you have played already and you can see where you stopped.

PicoDrive also does this on the GP2X, very slick feature!

 

[greendots]

300MB is a bit much... XBMC is only about 60MB and has more then enough features. That said, with some work it could be a perfect emu launcher for pandora.

 

[skeezix]

XBMC doens't have overmuch to do with what I was talking about (go read post , but I agree.. t woudl be sweet on panda

What I was talking about is making readily availble screenshot database, so then when browsing roms/disk-images/etc you could right away have a half dozen screenies showing (without having to make them yourself, or run the game/disk to get them, etc.)

jeff

 

[greendots]

Yes I know what you mean

XBMC is capable of doing that using plugin(s). XBMC would have the added benefit of having all of your media including music, movies and emulators in a single GUI.

For example, you could browse through all your movies, music albums, pictures, and roms in an interface like the IPhone has for its albums. Press your finger on pandora's touch screen and drag through with kinetic scrolling. Just tap the focused rom to begin playing it.